THE 80/80 MARRIAGE: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship, by Nate and Kaley Klemp. (Penguin Life, $26.) The authors, high-powered executive coaches, realized their marriage was suffering from the pressure to pull equal weight. They came up with the concept of the 80/80 marriage, where both members strive for “radical generosity.” This book explains how to make it work. “With the idea that everything needs to be 50/50, life becomes a constant negotiation: If I’m stacking the dishes in the dishwasher, why are you playing Civilization and not reading to the kids?” Judith Newman writes in her latest self-help column. “I love the idea of making generosity the focus of a book, and a relationship.”
IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire, by Laurence Bergreen. (Custom House, $29.99.) As Bergreen colorfully recounts, the rule of Elizabeth I and the voyages of Francis Drake — a superlative navigator with a habit of piracy — were the catalysts leading to England’s rise as a world power. “Drake’s story is both dramatic and timely,” Nigel Cliff writes in his review. “His global joy ride may not have been intended as a geopolitical statement, and his later adventures ended in disaster. But he helped chart a course for the future British Empire, which learned to be more freewheeling and commercial, less draconian and statist than its Spanish forebear.”
MY FRIEND NATALIA, by Laura Lindstedt. Translated by David Hackston. (Liveright, $24.) An unorthodox psychologist — a practitioner of an original, writing-based “layer therapy” — recounts sessions with an eccentric, sex-obsessed patient. The result is an intriguing cerebral novel, a playful Lacanian satire and a philosophical meditation on memory. “The patient will rewrite herself while being semi-authored by the psychologist,” Hermione Hoby writes in her review, noting that the therapist exerts at least as much interest as the patient: “The deeper, indeed more layered, mystery is, it emerges, the novel’s chimerical narrator.”
WHO WILL PAY REPARATIONS ON MY SOUL? Essays, by Jesse McCarthy. (Liveright, $27.95.) In essays written during the period bookended by the police killings of Michael Brown in 2014 and both Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, this stunning debut collection reveals how Black resistance happens not just in politics and in the streets, but in art, church and the academy. “McCarthy’s essays are richly varied, and one surmises the abundant intersections of art and race were in large measure informed by his own experiences growing up Black in America and in France,” Jerald Walker writes in his review. “With a younger readership at the top of his mind but an open invitation to all, McCarthy seems determined to draw attention to African-Americans’ ‘true strength’ and ‘worth.’”
THE RAVINE: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, by Wendy Lower. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) Lower, a historian, homes in on one photo of a Ukrainian Jewish woman and child being shot by Germans and locals, using forensic research in her quest to identify everyone in the frame, tying the atrocities to perpetrators. “Lower shows that it takes a lot of people to kill a lot of people,” Susie Linfield writes in her review. “Her book is a refutation of those who urge us not to look.”
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